A call for tomato seeds
Canadians: Do you have any heritage tomato varieties that show some resistance to blight and other pests and diseases? Do you have any extra seeds that you would be willing to donate to a breeding project?
We are hoping to get a new tomato breeding project up and running this spring, and we need a good genetic base to start from. We have a few varieties already, but the more variation we start with, the better. Any number of seeds that you can donate would be helpful.
Seeds can be mailed to:
12 John Street
Guelph, Ontario N1H 1T4
Thank you!
A call for tomato seeds
I shall be growing the variety Manitoba this year (unfortunately not in Canada.) I’ll let you know how I get on with it.
Samuel
So far....
Here are the varieties we already have to start out with:
I’ll be speaking with a number of seed-saver groups to see what they recommend for varieties that have some resistance to blight, stem rot, leaf spot, wilt, etc. — as well as hornworms, aphids, psyllids, etc.
Parent tomatoes
Blight has now been present on my land for three weeks all the potatoes apart from sarpo axona have perished. The tomatoes resisted infection for nearly two weeks before signs began to develop. One of the first to shows signs was unfortunatly Manitoba a Canadian variety the good news is it’s still standing and has plenty of green leaf and the fruits are largely unharmed. However as the blight has now spread to all the 20 varieties I am trialing I don’t hold much hope of geting ripe fruit. The weather this year has been perfect for blight and bad for tomatoes. Not just because of the blight, but the cold and wind. I have decided to use weight of fruit set as my selection criteria this year as none of the varieties look to be exceptionally resistant and the ability to set fruit in this bad weather is more important than a slightly greater resistance.
I have discovered another tomato breeding project in Germany. It is based at the University of Gottingen. They started with 3500 accesions in 2003, and reduced this down during the following 3 years and made crosses with the best selections. They now have resistant varieties of wild, cocktail, salad, processing and beefsteak tomatoes. I am trying to obtain seeds for next year.
Tomato trial
My Tomato trial finished at the end of August. I grew 20 different varieties, 6 from the heritage seed library and the rest were heirloom and standard varieties from commercial catalogues. by the end of August it was evident that 3 varieties were significantly better that all the rest. The varieties were Alaskan Fancy, Red Alert and Glacier with Glacier being the only variety to ripen fruit on the plant. All 3 of these varieties might have been able to ripen a good crop without the parasite interferance from the other varieties some of which were very suceptible.
I will now use Glacier as a control in all futher evaluations of new varieties. My intention is to cross pollinate the 3 varieties as early in the year as possible in the hopes that I can get the F2 generation ready for sowing in August while the blight is still around. I will save the best seedlings and then use single seed decent for 3 generations before trialing them at the correct time of year I shall use the best 3 or 4 plants along with any other comparable selections I can find in the meantime to make a population for futher selection.
Glacier and Red Alert are available from Thompson and Morgan, as is Matina a variety used in the developement of the German tomatoes mentioned in my previous post.
Unfortunately the cultivation of heterogenous mixtures is illegal under EU law! We can only cultivate regestered varieties so I have decided to use single seed decent in the hopes of speeding up the breeding process. I am at least allowed to eat and probably to give away tomatoes from my breeding but i’m not allowed to sell seed or fruit from crosses.